As part of asserting itself as the "sole superpower" and maintaining a "decisive military advantage" over the rest of the world, U.S. imperialism is applying a hypocritical, double-standard on the issue of the acquisition of nuclear weapons by other states. For example, while the U.S. government imposes economic sanctions on Iran for an alleged intention to build nuclear weapons "some time in the future," it says nothing about the existing nuclear arsenal of Israel.

The fact is that international treaties such as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) have been used by the U.S. government as a means for ensuring its nuclear superiority and its nuclear blackmail over other nations and peoples. For example, in the 43 years since the NPT went into effect U.S. imperialism has not only greatly enlarged its nuclear arsenal and modernized its delivery systems but spread its net of nuclear weapons over the entire globe, deploying these instruments of mass destruction in many countries and filling the oceans and skies with nuclear armed submarines and bombers.

The U.S. government's nuclear weapons program and its policy of nuclear blackmail arises from the economic aims and strategic objectives of U.S. imperialism. In 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Top-level government officials admitted that these bombs were dropped with the aim of threatening the Soviet Union and the emerging national liberation movements. As then Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary, the U.S. wanted to emerge from World War II as the imperialist superpower with the "atom bomb ostentatiously on our hip."

In the sixty-plus years since the end of WW II, U.S. imperialism has repeatedly used nuclear weapons as an instrument of its foreign policy. During the Korean war, in Lebanon in 1958, during the Cuban missile crisis, in Vietnam, in Iran in 1980 and many other times, the U.S. government has threatened the peoples with nuclear strikes and even risked all-out nuclear war in order to suppress the national liberation movements and intimidate other states and peoples.

Yet even while it is U.S. imperialism itself which boasts a first-strike nuclear doctrine and the biggest nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government uses the pretext of "stopping nuclear proliferation" in order to interfere in the affairs of other countries. The Obama administration relies on its own allegations of a so-called "nuclear threat" from North Korea and Iran as a means to pressure these countries.

The U.S. government uses the program of nuclear superiority and blackmail in order to protect the empire of the U.S. multi-national corporations, which plunder the resources and super-exploit the labor of peoples throughout the world. To control sources of raw materials, maintain its strategic spheres of influence and domination, and protect its investments, U.S. imperialism, relies, in the final analysis on military might, including its policy of nuclear superiority and blackmail.

Grave dangers are confronting the peoples everywhere. Contradictions and rivalries between the big imperialist powers and competing capitalist states are intensifying. So too, imperialism is stepping up its program of colonial and neo-colonial domination, including its military pressure and intervention against sovereign states. These contradictions bear the seeds of new imperialist wars, including the danger that nuclear weapons will again be used against the peoples.

The peoples of every country aspire to a world of peace and cooperation amongst nations, to a genuine disarmament and the abolition of nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction. The struggle for disarmament and peace must be directed against U.S. imperialism and the other big imperialist powers, who hold their nuclear swords over the whole world and carry out interference and aggression against the peoples.